Recently, amid the so-called ‘Jang Yun-gi case,’ allegations that a serving senior police officer was involved in destroying evidence have severely shaken confidence in front-line investigative agencies. Serious moral hazard and systemic loopholes have been laid bare inside the very national investigative apparatus that is supposed to uncover the substantive truth of crimes and protect victims.

From a common-sense standpoint, when internal police control systems fail like this, the proper response is to tighten the mechanisms of external oversight and checks. Yet the current debate over restructuring the criminal justice system is heading in exactly the opposite direction: it proposes to abolish outright even the prosecution's ‘supplementary investigation authority,’ which is the minimum legal check on police investigations.

To understand why abolishing the prosecution's supplementary investigation authority is so dangerous, one must first confront how dire the situation is on the front lines of investigation, particularly in economic crimes such as fraud and embezzlement. From the perspective of a practicing attorney, the sense of crisis over the investigative vacuum has already passed the tipping point. In the past, when a fraud victim filed a complaint, investigative agencies would trace the flow of funds through compulsory measures such as account tracking and put pressure on the perpetrator. Since the reallocation of investigative authority, however, things have changed completely. With a flood of cases pouring into the economic crime teams of local police stations, it has become practically impossible for investigators suffering from chronic understaffing and excessive workloads to swiftly untangle matters involving complex financial structures or civil-law issues.

As a result, the legal community has recently witnessed the farce of crime victims who, unable to simply wait on a police investigation, first file a civil suit with their counsel, obtain key evidence such as bank transaction records themselves through court-ordered fact inquiries, and only then file a criminal complaint. Individual victims are filling, at their own expense, a gap that public authority is supposed to fill. This is because attorneys and victims alike feel all too painfully the woefully inadequate capacity of investigative agencies. Against this desperate reality, cutting away even the prosecution's authority to take over an incomplete police investigation, fill in the evidentiary holes, and decide whether to indict would amount to giving fraudsters wings.

The core of the Criminal Procedure Act amendment currently being pushed is to abolish the prosecution's direct investigation authority and supplementary investigation authority, leaving only a 'right to request' supplementary investigation by the police. In practice, this heralds an enormous disaster. If prosecutors can no longer conduct supplementary investigations themselves, then even when an obvious gap is found in the case file or a key witness interview has been omitted, prosecutors will be unable to investigate directly and will have to send the file back to the police. The police, buried under a mountain of new complaints, will then have to re-examine the returned case, and in the process the case falls into the so-called ‘investigative ping-pong’ phenomenon, bouncing between police and prosecutors for months, or even years.

Time is squarely on the perpetrator's side. In a fraud case, for example, the ultimate goal goes beyond punishing the perpetrator to the victim's ‘recovery of losses.’ During the one or two years that an investigation is delayed, fraudsters have already siphoned the proceeds into accounts under borrowed names or laundered and hidden them through virtual assets and the like. Even if an indictment eventually follows, victims who have lost their entire life savings are left shedding tears of blood before a perpetrator who is already penniless. Abolishing supplementary investigation authority is not merely a matter of stripping the prosecution of its powers; it is an act that permanently deprives victims of the ‘golden hour’ for recovering their losses.

Economic offenders and politicians with capital and information can hire attorneys and somehow defend themselves. But ordinary people who have lived honestly all their lives and lost everything overnight to voice phishing, rental deposit (jeonse) fraud, or cryptocurrency investment fraud have no choice but to rely on the state's investigative capacity.

The reality is that even when the prosecution and police mobilize all their investigative capabilities and cooperate, they struggle to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated intelligent crime. Countless citizens have already suffered for years from investigative delays and gaps, yet without offering a single effective remedy, the attempt to pull out the last remaining safety pin of the judicial system while trapped in the political dogma of ‘curtailing prosecutorial power’ is utterly irresponsible.

Investigative authority is not the exclusive property of any particular agency; it is merely a tool entrusted to the state to protect the lives and property of the people. Institutional reform must be carried out strictly from a practical, citizen-centered perspective: ‘how can wronged victims be remedied more swiftly and more accurately?’

Where misconduct or corruption by particular police officers has occurred, the proper legislative direction is to strengthen recusal systems that prevent conflicts of interest and to refine a system of mutual checks that allows superior and other agencies to intervene and investigate immediately. Abolishing supplementary investigation authority without a clear alternative or investment in investigative infrastructure will go down in history as the most painful blunder, one that turns its back on the tears of innocent victims and hands criminals a free pass. (Shin Dong-woo, Managing Partner, DAEON Law Firm)

Source: MediaFine (https://www.mediafine.co.kr)